Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Tar for Mortar by Jonathan Basile (Punctum)

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The visible work of this book is easily and briefly enumerated:

The most compact way I know to express Jorge Luis Borges’s brain-bending irony slides in between the second and third words of the title of his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” The title creates a compact version of the self-canceling liar paradox  credited to the ancient philosopher Epimenides: if the essay’s argument is “new,” time has not been refuted, but if the “refutation” does what it claims and deconstructs time, the modifying word “new” becomes meaningless. So far, so self-consuming. Borges’s essay, like many of his fictions, dances across the edges of veracity and what Jonathan Basile, in Tar for Mortar, his brilliant new open-source reading of Borges, calls “the dream of totality.”

Basile, the creator of the amazing libraryofbabel.info website that digitally replicates the conditions of Borges’s famous story, “The Library of Babel,” brings to this book multiple strengths: razor-sharp analytical skills, precise writing, and a web-master’s experience of wrestling with a digital instantiation of Borges’s thought experiment. He’s written a brilliant book about Borges — that would be enough of a great thing for me — which also has important things to say about intellectual ambition, irony, language, and the things that the Digital Humanities can and cannot reveal.

… An examination of the essential metric laws of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909)

What Basile terms the “dream of totality” turns out, as he cogently shows, to be quixotic in a very precise way: the fantasy never corresponds to reality, but the act of dreaming changes the world in which the dreamer lives. “Totality itself,” Basile observes, “is essentially incomplete” (17). This lack of wholeness redounds upon the dreamer. “In all its forms,” he continues, “the library should lead us to think differently about the possibility of originality or novelty” (17). The limits of both Borges’s Library and language itself — the fact that “even the most unpredicted or unpredictable event is intelligible to us only by means of conforming to pre-existing concepts and forms of experience” (18) — bounds our thinkable universe. The world spreads itself before us, in physical space and also inside the slim & somewhat broken copy of Borges’s Labyrinths that I have sitting on my desk right now. The fragile New Directions paperback is the second of several copies that I have owned, but the oldest still in my possession. My notes in spidery pencil marked the pages in the mid-1980s, when I treated myself to an undergrad course on Borges and Latin American fiction with James Irby, who translated most of the material in this volume. Around that same time that I changed tracks from my plans to major in theoretical mathematics and turned instead to literature, where I remain today.

… A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December 1909)

“I no longer long for a solution” (18), Basile writes after a wonderfully thorough analysis of the possible and impossible structures of “The Library of Babel.” He comes to think that “Borges has an imagination that surpasses lucidity to its dark hinter-side, the mind of what I would prefer to call an anarchitect, whose great vision was an ability to lead us into blindness” (18). At the far end of the paradox lies “Borges’s irony” (18) and his habit of breaking open all conceptions of totality even as he dreams them in their fiercest and most capacious forms. At the end of Basile’s gorgeous investigation and careful parsing of “The Library of Babel,” he arrives at Borges’s auto-ironic not-quite-nihilism: “there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambiguous word” (64). In an odd moment of vertigo that I associate with a lifetime of reading Borges, I noticed when I first read that quoted sentence — at the hinge of Basile’s book — that the passage was one I’d also quoted myself, at the conclusion of the “Brown” chapter I wrote for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology in 2013 — a chapter and book that also marked a redoubling or intensifying of my own ecomaterialist turn.

The broken spine of my undergrad copy of Labyrinths

… almost infinitely richer …

Repetition looks different under a Borgesian lens. It’s not very strange that Basile and I, two American Borgistas, would quote the same resonant phrase. In its playful doubling of universal meaning, the phrase perfectly captures Basile’s argument about irony and totality; I used it to make a similar point about environmental identity and excess. But the echo worked on my imagination as I turned into the second chapter of Tar for Mortar, which moved from an explication of the experience of creating libraryofbabel.info and a comparative reading of “self-contradiction” in Borges and Nietzsche regarding the Eternal Return. Now I started to get suspicious, and I opened the title page of my mid-’80s copy of Labyrinths to the notes for what would become my final paper in that course: “the Eternal Return / see last pp. of ‘Garden.'” I didn’t know much about Nietzsche at that time — I would have benefited greatly from Basile’s cogent explication in this book! — but I foisted on James Irby at the end of that long-ago semester many pages of undergraduate Borgesiana, circling around Eternal Returns and paradoxes of space and time. I’ve long since lost the paper itself, but my memory is that he thought I should maybe read more Nietzsche, but he appreciated my enthusiasm for Borges.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.

Basile finds in Nietzsche and Borges examples of “text[s] at odds with [themselves]” (82). The ironic, self-negating core of both authors, and their common sources in the atomist tradition in philosophy, require what Basile wonderfully terms “a sly self-assurance when expressing themselves by means of contradiction” (86). In Nietzsche, the characteristic mode is aggressive “affirmation” (86) in the face of impossibility. For Borges, the characteristic turn exits pure philosophy for aesthetics and fiction: his muse-mouthpieces are not the prophet Zarathustra, but more literary figures, Don Quixote, or his not-translator Pierre Menard. Or perhaps his abiding figure occupies the ironic separation the Argentine author described between himself and “the other one, the one called Borges, … the one things happen to” (“Borges y yo” Irby trans. 246).

Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.

The third and shortest chapter of Basile’s book takes up a question, “In Which It Is Argued, Despite Popular Opinion to the Contrary, that Borges Did Not Invent the Internet.” It’s a smart, witty reply to misreadings of Borges as prophet of digital utopia. Basile makes a compelling case that Borges’s works display “the deferral of presence across several virtualities” (87) rather than an anticipation of digital mediation in multiple modes. He instead argues that the central idea in Borges reveals “the rupture of a ceaseless differing-from-self” (91). In wonderfully compact prose, Basile concludes with an image of Borges as exploring “the lack of totality, the finitude and uncertainty that plague even the grandest project of any cognition shuttling between uniqueness and iterability” (92). But the lingering image with which the book closes is not this conceptual split but “the corner of the smile that recognizes in this finitude the possibility of all play” (92.)

Notes from the 1980s

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

There are a few writers I loved obsessively as a boy — maybe it’s just Borges and Thomas Pynchon for whom I feel this level of intensity — to whom I return eagerly and also apprehensively, with the awareness that what I found in these authors indelibly marked my younger self. I read Borges today with teenage Steve on my shoulder, wondering what he made of these texts then and how they changed him. I wonder how that reading and thinking translated me from a long-ago New Jersey suburb to where I am now. (Actually, I live now in a Connecticut suburb, so maybe I’m not that far away, though the decades and detours feel immense and labyrinthine.) I’m grateful to Jonathan Basile for his rich and brilliant investigation of this writer who means so much to me. All Borgistas, or really anyone who cares about literature, language, and speculative thinking, should read this open-access book. And support punctum books!

[All quotations in bold from James E. Irby’s translation of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”]

The final “elegant hope” of the narrator of “The Library of Babel” imagines some eternal traveler making infinite peregrinations through the Library who would in inhuman time “see the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order” (Irby 58). An universal and cyclical library would suture the paradoxical combination of maximum iterability in linguistic signs, “a number which, although extremely vast, is not infinite” (54), and extension in physical space. Like Basile and like Borges’s narrator, I’ve been turning that possibility over in my head for a long time. I’m so pleased to have revisited it in the good company of Tar for Mortar.

RSC King Lear @ BAM

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Sometimes you get lucky and see a major theatrical star play a canonical role in a transformative way. The contours of the role remain familiar, but the actor inhabits them more fiercely than you expect. He surprises you, even though you’ve seen the play lots of times and don’t expect to be surprised. He fixes your attention whenever he’s onstage. At times he slightly distorts the way you see the play, bending it just a bit in his direction. You start to imagine a slightly different play, tilting slowly out of its usual orbit into a different perspective.

I drove home from Brooklyn last night with my imagination inflamed by Paapa Essiedu’s brilliant performance of Edmund, the Bastard of Gloucester and sub-plot’s villain in King Lear.

It’s true that I was supposed to be afire with a different performance. Anthony Sher’s mad King was strong and lucid. As he devolved from inacessible tyrant carried in atop a litter in the opening scene to doting Dad who doesn’t mind prison as long as he can sing with Cordelia “like birds i’the cage,” he became somewhat more engaging — but he never captured my attention the way Essiedu’s Edmund did. Sher was stately, plump, a bit formal in his clarity. Essiedu was the thing itself.

Anthony Sher as Lear and Graham Turner as the Fool

I’ve got a pet theory about the relationship of the plot and subplot in the final scene. While Edmund’s minions are killing Cordelia off-stage, the action presents a long interlude in which disguised Edgar challenges and defeats his till-then-triumphant evil brother Edmund. The combat set-piece runs for 145 lines in the Arden 3 edition (lines 90-235), or 35% of the stage time before Lear enters howling with his daughter’s corpse. (Actually, since the silent stage combat takes some time, the Gloucester brothers subplot occupies more of the scene than that percentage indicates.) In an unstageable gambit that seems meaningful to me, I imagine a split-screen for those 145 lines, showing the audience that while we enjoy the chivalric episode of the battling brothers, Edmund’s murderers hang Cordelia. If only we didn’t like sword-play so much perhaps we’d pay attention in time to rescue her! “Great thing of us forgot!”

Paapa Essiedu as Edmund

The relationship between plot and subplot in King Lear is a bit strange. The play is the only major tragedy to have a substantial independent sub-plot — such plots are more common in comedies — and the two stories come from very different sources. The main narrative of the King and his daughters is a medieval tale from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by way of Holinshed, the Mirror for Magistrates, and the anonymous play the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The sub-plot of rival brothers and their blinded father comes via Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia, published around the same time as the Leir play in 1590, but Sidney’s source in turn was the classical prose romance The Aethiopian History of Heliodorus — a book that’s my personal pick for the greatest mostly unread text in Western literary history. The sinuous way in which Shakespeare’s King Lear entangles and disengages the medieval chronicle history and the Byzantine Greek romance comprises a thorough study in the legacies of these major genres and story-patterns in early modern English literary history.

Last night, I was on the side of Heliodorus, Sidney, Edmund, and Essiedu, even though I know the production wanted me to be with Geoffrey, the Mirror, Lear, and Sher. I’m probably susceptible because my first book on Elizabethan romance narrative had a Heliodoran heart. But Essiedu’s intensity carried me along. He’s a rising star, as I already guessed when I saw his Hamlet in Stratford in 2016. I thought his Edmund was even a tick better. He’s one to keep an eye on!

There were some other good performances in the RSC Lear, including David Troughten as an imposing Earl of Gloucester, Mimi Ndiweni as a compelling Cordelia, and Nia Gwynne as a charismatic and beautiful Goneril, whose face-off with her father while he cursed her “organs of increase” was especially powerful. The understudy Patrick Elue did a great job playing Kent last night, and the appreciative cast gave him his own curtain call at the long play’s end. It took me a little while to warm to Oliver Johnstone’s Edgar, who was strongest when naked and mad, perhaps a bit less compelling when sane and compassionate.

There’s still time to get to the Harvey Theater to see this one before April 29!

Anthony Sher as Lear with Mimi Ndiweni as Cordelia

The Winter’s Tale @ Tfana

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I’m in the middle of a three-plays-in-five-days theaterathon — Lear at BAM tomorrow! — so just some quick notes on a lively and ultimately very moving production of The Winter’s Tale at Tfana.

It’s a real treat to see this play now. I’m getting ready to travel to Mississippi next week, to give the James Edwin Savage Lecture on “Nature Loves to Err: Catastrophe and Ecology in The Winter’s Tale.” Not only my slides will be colored by Arin Arbus’s production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn!

1. Dancing Bear / Thief in Snow 

Arnie Burton in a bear suit

The bear is always the star of the show, and Arnie Burton’s turn in the bear suit was pure joy. Whether playing in the snow before the opening scene or performing an extended dance-off with Antigonus before the chase, his bear was playful, not destructive. This goofy generosity even amid destruction spilled over into the rest of the production, including during Burton’s expert audience-wrangling as Autolycus. Burton played both bear and thief with charisma and verve. Perhaps he was less threatening in each part that he could have been — but that was the spirit of the show, which emphasized wonder over horror. That’s probably why the Bohemian pastoral redemption of second half seemed more compelling that the Sicilian tragedy before intermission — but this somewhat ungainly and gorgeously excessive play is also built in that asymmetrical way.

2. How tall is heroism? 

Dion Mucciacito as Polixenes; Kelley Curran as Hermione; Anatol Yusef as Leontes

I’m 6’4″ tall, and I basically see the world as being full of people mostly the same as my very normal height, with a few others who are a couple of inches shorter. But I spent a lot of time thinking about height during the first half of this show, partly because Kelley Curran’s authoritative Hermione towered over Anatol Yusef’s Leontes. The opening scene, in which the Queen convinces the royal guest to stay after he has refused at the King’s request, performed competing male and female forms of authority. “A lady’s verily,” Hermione quipped, “is as potent as a lord’s.” The height differential staged that rivalry in interestingly visual ways that other characters took up also: Polixenes was just a bit taller than Hermione, but in Bohemia both Clown and Shepherd were towering string beans. During the trial scene, King Leontes mounted a throne that put his head just above his now-disgraced Queen, but he descended in response to her powerfully-delivered self-defense. Am I superficial if I thought Yusef’s Leontes, like his Laertes last summer at the Public, a bit underpowered? Maybe I am. I thought Yusef’s line readings were overly smooth and somewhat disengaged, even during the rising eruptions of his jealousy (1.2). He was clear, which is a good thing, but he was not, to my ears, authoritative. This play distinguishes itself by its trio of powerful women, Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita, standing up against the male monarchs, but I thought this Leontes wasn’t really holding his end up as well as he might.

3. Hermione and the shapes of female power

A more positive way to frame that quibble would be to note that Curran’s Hermione stole the show whenever she was onstage, including a stunning statue scene that brought her back in a quasi-wedding gown. Mahira Kakkar’s Paulina was also a powerful stage presence, perhaps even a bit bullying toward Leontes after he’s broken his kingdom and family. Nicole Rodenberg’s Perdita rounded out the female trio. All three gave great performances, but of the male actors only Eddie Ray Jackson’s Florizel, and perhaps also Burton’s Autolycus, seemed able to match them.

John Keating and Ed Malone as wet clowns

Hermione’s pregnant body in the opening scene carried a powerful stage charge, and a moment in which she invited Polixenes to touch her belly and feel the hidden baby move was staged as a key trigger for Leontes’s regicidal rage. In a strange extension of the play’s performance of pregnancy, the country maids Mopsa and Dorcas (Maechi Aharanwa and Liz Wisan) of 4.4 were both also played as heavily pregnant. During their joint performance of the “Two Maids Wooing a Man” ballad, they even belly-butted each other, sumo style. The audience appreciated the excess of the show Autolycus staged, but it seemed symbolically confusing.

4. Time, the Oracle, the Statue

At the moment I’m thinking obsessively about “Time, the Chorus” in relation to my upcoming talk at Ole Miss and also regarding my general #pluralizetheAnthropocene ideas. In Brooklyn right now, the bear gets top billing. Robert Langdon Lloyd played a creditable white-bearded Old Man Time, but the more striking theatrical coup was the Oracle. Arbus’s direction emphasized the formal theatricality of the Oracle; Michael Rogers, who also played an impressive Camillo, sat stoic on the side of the stage as Hermione orated and Leontes dismissed her — but it was clear that Apollo would have the final word. Like the statue in the final scene, the Oracle was set apart from the action. The non-Oracular clarity of the God’s words knocked the king to his knees: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes, blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant…” Yusef’s finest moment as Leontes, to my mind, came in response to the Oracle: he doubled up, fell, and clapped his hands to his mouth, unable to speak. His wretched reposte, “There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle,” seemed hauled out from deep in his jealous bowels. He could not look at his Queen as he clung to her supposed guilt.

Arnie Burton as Autolycus looking for clothes to steal

5. Clowns and other responses to the storm

The other element of the play that I’ll be talking about next week is (of course) the shipwreck scene, which also doubles as the bear scene and the transition from tragic Sicilia to tragicomic Bohemia. The bear stole the show, but the Clown who buried half-eaten Antigonus, played by Ed Malone, and the Old Shepherd who found the infant castaway, played by John Keating, performed the shift into comic verve. Costume changes carried us into the new Bohemian mode: the rural men wore yellow slickers for the storm scene, and Autolycus sang his first song in just his skivvies. By contrast with the evening-wear formality of the Sicilian court, we clearly had arrived at a more practical place.

6. Mamillius

Memories of the dead son linger after the statue comes back to life. In this production, Eli Rayman as Mamillius took a silent turn before the final curtain, running in between Hermione and Leontes after the final non-rhyming lines had been pronounced. The symbolism was pretty on the nose — the dead boy flashed in between the couple’s efforts to reunify their marriage — but the royal pair still walked off together. I’ve only seen the full impact of the child’s death played once — in a devastating final tableau by Propeller at BAM in 2005 — but I appreciated the hint here.

Hermione, Leontes, and Nicole Rodenburg as Perdita, after that which was lost is found

Get to Fort Greene by April 15 to see this one!

Father Comes Home at Yale Rep

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Stephen Anthony Jones as the Oldest Old Man (Part 1) Photo by Joan Marcus

When Suzan Lori-Parks’s Civil War-era rewriting of the Odyssey first played at the Public in 2014, I didn’t make it — despite reading Christopher Isherwood’s rave that it was the best new play of the year. I was holding tickets to the Saturday preview in New Haven for March 17 this year, but that show was cancelled b/c a storm delayed moving the set into town. But I was — finally! — able to see the three-hour epic last night at Yale’s University Theater. I wondered if it could possibly live up to the hype.

It did. Almost entirely, and especially in the incandescent, hilarious, shocking third act. What a show!

I’m in the middle of a dense three-play run of my own right now, with Theater for a New Audience’s Winter’s Tale in Brooklyn tonight and the RSC Lear on Tuesday at BAM. So just a few quick notes about this amazing, inventive Beckett-meets-Homer-as-history-play masterpiece.

Part 1: The Measure of a Man

The slave Hero, played with charisma and power by James Udom, sat in the Odysseus role, but in the first part he’s faced with the choice of Achilles: will he or won’t he go to the wars? His decision revolved around the conflicting advice of his adopted father, “The Oldest Old Man,” played by Stephen Anthony Jones, and his de facto wife Penny, played by Eboni Flowers. The Old Man advised Hero to go for glory but Penny wanted her man home. This triangular debate got disrupted by the wild card of a maimed character named Homer, played by Julian Elijah Martinez. Homer’s connection to his Greek namesake wasn’t yet clear, but it turned out that Hero was the one who cut off Homer’s foot years ago, when the “boss master” forced him to cripple his friend after Homer had tried to escape. The threat of violence — including a scene in which Hero’s naked foot waits for the knife — lingered.

Part 2: A Battle in the Wilderness 

James Udom as Hero and Tom Pecinka as Smith (Part 2) Photo by Joan Marcus

The second part, set during the war, featured a triangular conversation between the boss-master Colonel, played with comic and moving gusto by Dan Hiatt, Hero, and Union prisoner Smith, played by Tom Pecinka. Punctuated by cannon blasts that indicate the near arrival of both armies, the three men explored service, loyalty, and race, with banjo accompaniment. The Colonel’s hymn to whiteness seemed as if it would mark a painful high point for this episode — but then Smith’s attempt to woo Hero into escaping to a black Union regiment topped that.

Part 3: The Union of the Confederate Parts

After an intermission and already two hours in, I recognized the pattern the play was building: long, somewhat leisurely scenes that grew into crescendo. The second Part topped the first, and while I figured that for Part 3 we’d be back at the slave cabin where we’d started, it wasn’t clear how Lori-Parks could exceed the intensity of Part 2, framed by cannons and with Smith’s wounded and festering leg as a dramatic focus. I should not have worried.

The last part started back home, and Homer — whose parallel in Greek epic wasn’t clear in part 1 — turned out to be the Suitors! But, in a twist, he’s a loving suitor and real alternative to wandering Ulysses. The go-or-not choice in Part 3 belonged to Penny. Homer convinced her at one point to escape with him and other runaways to the north and freedom. But then the returning warriors came home, starting first not with Hero but Odd-sea Dog, played brilliantly with comic excess, frequent requests for belly rubs, and shaggy dog-storifying by Gregory Wallace. The dog kept everyone guessing about whether Hero survived the war that killed the boss-master for so long that I thought maybe the twist would be that only the dog made it home — but no, Hero, who had now taken the name Ulysses after the Union general, returned. The third of three triangles featured Ulysses, Homer, and Penny. I won’t spoil the surprise, or the joy, of the ending — except to say that the story will go on.

Gregory Wallace as Odyssey Dog (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Lori-Parks says she’s going to write six more parts of this epic for a total of nine, so we should get to hear more about Penny, Homer, Ulysses, Odyssey Dog, and the rest. I can’t wait! We’re lucky to be living through the production of great art.

#shax2018: Conversations & utopias in LA

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  1. The Hotel Postmodernism

    Her small grey head peaked out of the swell about twenty feet away from us. The curve of her back echoed the small waves rolling in through the slate-green Pacific off Venice Beach. In all the years I’ve been swimming in this little slice of ocean, down the street from where I lived in 1993-1994 right before grad school, I’d never had one of these creatures swim with me before. A selkie totem for #shax2018, the seal’s nearness startled us and calmed our shivering flesh. She swam between where we splashed into the water and where neoprene-armored surfers caught a few small waves. I lost sight of her after I body-surfed one little roller into shore. I don’t have a pic — I was phoneless in the water when we saw her — but that seal is my utopian totem for #shax2018. The benediction of nonhuman presence in the ocean!

  2. The last of four conversation topics in “The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us,” the  seminar I co-lead with Carla Della Gatta, with incisive and generous respondant-ing by Erika Lin, asked the room for possible SAA-utopias. The floodgates of the wonder-world gushed forth: we sought communities of labor, changes in infrastructure and scale, “psychosocial mentoring” (which clarifying term Erika brought to us via Tracy Davis of Northwestern and ASTR) , recurrent seminars, more streamed or recorded sessions, “Half-assed Shakespeare,” the value of allowing ourselves to be wrong, “radical hospitality” (via Becky Fall and the Public Theatre, though I also thought of the glories of the BABEL Working Group), stewardship, service, public-facing events, “conflict is part of community” (paraphrased from Erika). What is “Shakespeare”? Who is “us”? What can and should the SAA become? So many good questions to keep asking!

    Inside the Bonaventure

  3. My core takeaways from the two hours traffic of our seminar swirled around support and especially mentorship, how it happens and what it could be. The topic came up again in the brilliant and necessary “Shakespeare beyond the Research University” session on Saturday, the second iteration of the “Shakespearean Futures” initiative that started with “The Color of Membership” last year in stormy Atlanta. I personally feel deeply fortunate to have been mentored by the SAA, both by many discrete individuals and more diffusely by the organization itself, since I started coming to the conference in the mid-1990s. Drafting this post Sat night as I wait to board a red-eye back to JFK while #shax2018 still dances, I’m abuzz with ideas to extend and support that process in the new & larger 21c SAA. We don’t need to start from zero: RSA and ASTR have ongoing mentorship programs, both among members (I have been in touch this year with two early career mentees via RSA) and at the conference itself (a student of mine was lucky to be matched with my co-seminar leader Carla Della Gatta at ASTR this past fall). We should formalize something, perhaps in time for #shax2019 in DC. #mentorhappyhour (with EANABs = “Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages”)?
  4. Thursday afternoon’s NextGenPlen set the bar high for two reasons that I suspect are interwoven: the five early career speakers presented brilliant and innovative projects in queer theory, theater history, race theory, drag, and transgender rhetoric — and all five kept to time and dazzled the room with precise & powerful language. It made me think that ten minute talks are always better than twenty, because the short form prioritizes direct argument. It also made me eager to watch these young scholars develop their work and change our field!
  5. I suspect that few Native American languages have previously been spoken from the plenary stage at SAA. I found the Friday morning session with Scott Stevens, Lehua Yim, Terence Reilly, and James Lujan powerful and moving. The cultural and global dominance of Shakespeare represents, in a troubling way that the panel helped reveal, a global-cultural settler colonialism, in that the Bard goes everywhere and never leaves. There’s a lot of great scholarship on Global Shakespeares today — but I’d not encountered indigenous responses and approaches at the SAA before. During the panel I remembered my post-undergrad summer of 1989, when I was in Windy Bay, Alaska, laboring in the vain clean up of Exxon Valdez oil and sharing a fishing boat with perhaps two dozen members of an Athabascan community, mostly from English Bay. I’m embarrassed to say that I now can’t remember any of the tiny vocabulary I developed in Athabascan that summer.
  6. The first question we asked in our seminar was “What is Shakespeare?” And — importantly, I think — we supplemented that question with “Do we all have to agree about the answer?” The first question was hard to contain, but I think the answer to the second question must be no. Too much agreement is bad for conversation.

    A substantial pageant

  7. Our seminar’s second major exchange took up another key word in our title: “Who is ‘us'”? We had lots to say again, and our discussion balanced honesty and generosity in ways that made me really happy. For me, I think the best possible answers to both “Shax” and “us” emerge from conscious and cultivated differences: we and our symbolic center must be many things, multitudinous things. It’s through allowing differences in all their discomfort, challenge, and surprise that we navigate our seminars, conferences, and oceans. I also recognize that myriad-mindedness has long been a canonical & perhaps even neoimperial cliche, effectively confining while purportedly open. Does it make sense to ask now for different and tangible differences, rather than just the same old infinite variety? That’s a project I’d like to continue exploring, and I hope the members of the seminar will continue to pursue it also.
  8. The 8 am ocean swim on Saturday morning kept me from the “End of Study,” alas, but my adventure with surfers, seal, and maritime companion Lowell Duckert drew me back to my early ’90s haunts in Venice Beach, from which locale I launched myself into graduate school and the professional life I’m living now. In some sense Venice in those days was my last stop before Shakespeare, the moment at which I found a fork in young adulthood and turned. I loved being back there, and I no doubt bored Lowell by showing him my favorite coffee shop (the Rose Cafe), my old apartment building on Westminster Ave, the sandy bike path on which I roller bladed and where musicians, artists, and hippies were setting up in the early morning mist. We ate breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe, my old local, where I ate with my neighbors during the eerie dawn just after the Northridge MLK Day earthquake of 1994, which had jolted us out of bed. The electricity was out that morning but the gas stoves worked, so the Cafe made us all omelettes that we paid for later. We watched the sun come up behind the beach and hoped the ground would stop shaking. #anothermetaphor?
  9. What should the SAA become? I loved the “Lena Orlena” pageant and Wendy Wall’s multi-genred luncheon speech. No scholarly gathering makes me feel so at home and so eager to engage with people I don’t know yet as well as old friends and colleagues. “Beyond the Research University,” organized by Sharon O’Dair and Deborah Uman, seemed to me to get close to the heart of the matter. The diverse populations of SAA have much to learn from each other. Highlighting the worlds and labors of colleagues teaching at HBCUs, community colleges, and other non-elite places seems to me an essential step forward. Looking back now through the #shax2018 hashtag reveals outflows of generosity, curiosity, and playfulness. More of this, please! Excess of it!

  10. A surfer of Venice

    My only moment of real discomfort all weekend, other than fatigue, came when I considered the symbolism of matching the roundtable on “Beyond the Research University” against a brilliant research panel on “Slavery, Service, and Fictions of Consent” in the Saturday 11 am slot. What does that choice represent for the SAA as a collective: must we choose between research and beyond-research? I have deep regard & affection for the leadership of SAA and recognize the challenge of too many sessions angling for finite time — but I believe it was a mistake not to make the Futures session, which spoke to the experience of the majority of the SAA membership, a Plenary with no competing sessions. For most of our near half-century as an organization, the SAA has imagined the R1 experience as at least aspirationally normative — but as much as I value humanities research, that’s an error we should have the honesty to stop making. One striking moment in the Roundtable called for the demolition of the “myth of academic meritocracy.” We need that demolition so much — and, if we could do it, or even begin to unravel that foundational myth of academia, it could lead, I believe, to better things, even in hard times.

  11. The Futures session was well-attended, including by the incoming Executive Director, though I was sorry that only a small fraction of the Trustees were there. I don’t mean to blame the people who were next door. I’d previously heard a snippet of one project on early modern slavery that was presented in that session, and I think it’s as brilliant as any new project I know in our field. But that’s why I think it was problematic to force that choice on the membership. A session on the careers that the majority of SAA members present and future live “beyond the research university” should not have to compete for its audience with the fruits of research. The SAA can, does, and should support both cutting-edge research and inquiry into state of our profession. We don’t need to put th0se conversations in competition with each other, even implicitly. Or at least that’s what I think.
  12. I’ll wrap up this overlong blog post with another story of nonhuman intervention. This second encounter will provide an alternative allegory for our gathering. As our pomo architectural sage Fredric Jameson didn’t say, #alwaysallegorize! This one erupted during the “Shax and Us” seminar, just before we opened the conversation to the full room of auditors. It wasn’t a seal in the surf but a cockroach on the table: I don’t know if the bug actually crawled out from beneath a pile of seminar papers, or if that image of reading as unearthing the hidden is just the way I like to imagine all seminars. Carla moved fast when she saw it, and I think she swept the roach onto the floor. I jumped out of my chair, but by the time I got to the other side of the long table the beastie had scuttled away & besides what would I have done with or to it?

  13. One afternoon, as our conversation turned toward anxious visions of futurity, #shax2018 woke to discover that while we sat together around the table our collective conversation had been transformed into a monstrous bug.

  14. #shaxfutures #whatwillwebecome? #metamorphoses!

    Post-immersion selfie

  15. It’s our task to love the nonhuman, to welcome interruptions, and to imagine capaciously in the face of challenges. Which creature best represents Shakespeare as settler colonialist and superlative poet? The graceful seal gliding through Pacific waves, or the impervious bug whose resilient carapace will outlast nuclear and ecological catastrophes? Which do we want our bald playwright hero to represent? #sealorbug?
  16. We know what the answer must be.
  17. Both seal and roach, utopia and dystopia. #forward!
  18. See everyone in DC!

#marchforourlives: Denver, NOLA, DC, CT, & more

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The sign I carried in NOLA

Here’s a quick post of my awe in response to yesterday’s #marchforourlives anti-gun protests around the US and the world, spearheaded by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, where 17 students and faculty were killed with an Ar-15 on Feb 14, 2018.

I was in New Orleans for the Renaissance Society of America conference, and I marched from the Elysian Fields through the French Quarter with several thousand students and adults. As we turned up Canal St, a young woman lead the chant: “What do we want?” “Gun control!” “When do we need it?” “Now!”

Maddie speaking in Denver

Before the march started, I chatted with one of the organizers who, like me, was wearing a #MSDStrong t-shirt, made by members of the Parkland FL community. His nephew is a sophomore at MSD, and they were marching in Washington.

Before the CT march, with signs and Marjory Stoneman Douglas shirts

My niece Maddie King, who’s a junior at MSD and was in her physics class during the attack, was in Denver. She was the last of eleven speakers to rally 200,000 people before their march. My sister and my brother in law posted her full speech on Facebook live, and CNN also ran a lengthy excerpt from her speech as well as an interview with her after. I’m so impressed by and proud of this poised and powerful young woman. Little about American culture makes me as optimistic as the idea that these kids will be adults soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtKz5l3_5X4&feature=share

UPDATE: Here’s a YouTube of the full speech:

 

I’ll also add here the heart-rending speech that Maddie’s friend Emma Gonzalez gave to the DC march. These kids will change the world.

 

Alinor and Olivia marched locally in Guilford, CT, where our local CT state senator, Edward Kennedy, Jr., spoke about how it felt to him to lose his two uncles, John F. and Robert Kennedy, to gun violence.

Marching in CT

I wore my #msdstrong shirt, but I like this one too

Touching the Past (Again) and Letting Go of MEMSI

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Photo by Jesus Velasco

In the narrow hallway of the Hotel Lombardy, heading to the Venetian Room for the last of a decade’s epic of Old Fashioneds after MEMSI events, a brilliant scholar of medieval French accused me of being an old fashioned humanist. At first I thought she was joking, since I punched my posthuman card years ago, but I had, it took me a few minutes to realize, given a pretty humanist talk earlier that day. So I tried to explain myself. My current premodern Anthropocene project, as I tried to communicate in one of the super-intense intellectual exchanges of this past glorious weekend in DC, wants to salvage ethical traces of the human amid the swirl and pressure of more-than-human environs. I’m not sure how persuasive I was, then on the low couches of the Venetian room or earlier in my presentation. I’m seeking out a hybrid stew of human longing and posthuman wonder, an openness to change and disruption that also labors to build refuges and radical hospitality. But do I have the language for it?

On the 7 am train back to New Haven this morning I’m thinking that the not-only-human humanism that I rhapsodized owes quite a lot to MEMSI itself, and to the spark of communities that assemble, blaze, and disperse. A decade is a long time for a Humanities Institute, in some ways of thinking about time, though barely a blink in others. How many things would not have been possible but for this!

Ark & names.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Among the great innovations that Jeffrey Cohen & his merry band have supported through MEMSI has been a re-imagining and making-experimental of the robust ancient genre of the academic lecture. He saved a special treat for last this weekend. We spent most of two days sitting down to a hearty dozen talks on topics from San Francisco drag theater in the 1970s to twelfth-century Spanish legal structures to early modern bees and the market-fantasies used to sell expensive reproductions of medieval illuminated manuscripts, among many other things. Then we followed all those presentations with an impromptu set of unscripted closing “Letting Go” comments, with each of the speakers, chairs, and some brave volunteers walking up to the front of the room to extemporize on what had preceded, and what might yet follow.

Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

I loved all the talks, but these unrehearsed fragments were the best part of the weekend. I didn’t take notes, alas, and I’m pretty sure that what I’m remembering now, not much more than twelve hours and much wine and Indian food later, mashes up the more formal presentations with the closing snippets. But I’m going to try to reinhabit the moments, or maybe just bits of them.

Carolyn Dinshaw spoke at the start and end of the weekend about play, performance, and the desire of so many deeply textual and contextual literary critics to move beyond language into structures of feeling and physicality.

Julian Yates turned away from his bees and at the end off-the-cuffed with typical brilliance, reminding us that fetish-love for things past might not be so bad. He didn’t revisit it, but as he was speaking I thought of his brilliant fauxtemology for MEMSI itself, a name built out of equal helpings of mnemosyne the goddess of memory plus whimsey. Exactly right.

Joe Moshenka opened up the physicality of toys and playing, building on Carolyn’s opening move to think about what gets made into toys, who plays, what sorts of performances become public.

Gift giving.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Anthony Bale, whose stunning talk the afternoon before about following Marjory Kempe into modern Palestine upped the stakes of how I think about embodied scholarship, pushed us at the end of the second day toward thinking about the public stakes of touching many pasts.

Ellen MacKay extended her brilliant engagement with the public restaging of history by reminding us of the need we academics have to speak to beyond the confines of narrow rooms.

Dorothy Kim, whose whirlwind weekend also included a plenary talk about the Medieval Academy in Atlanta, uncovered the visible politics of race from Middle English narratives of St Margaret to 21c century popular and academic cultures.

At the end of the second day, I offered the mixed temporal imperatives of play (present), recover (past), and imagine (future), and I tried to wrap them in an inhuman and oceanic package called “circulation.”

Peggy McCracken developed a wonderfully material and aesthetic reading of Pygmalion’s “ivory” statue and the assimilation of whiteness and warmth to ideas of beauty and femininity.

Stephanie Trigg returned to play and touch, our weekend’s keywords and master-metaphors, and her delicate analysis of the rhetoric of high-priced facsimile reproductions of medieval manuscripts showed us how similar and dissimilar these fascinations are to scholarly inquiry. The paradox of “entirely similar,” which phrase she drew from a marketing website, resonated with our own professional desire to touch a past that we can’t fully encounter.

Jesus Velasco, who I hadn’t met before this weekend except on Facebook, performed a glorious excavation of 13c Spanish legal structures to help us think about fantasies of “convivencia” and legal personhood in medieval and modern contexts.

Cord Whitaker, relishing his role as closing speaker (twice!), enjoined us to celebrate MEMSI’s flourishing and our shared dedication to the promises that can be unearthed from shared and hidden pasts.

The home team of GWU session chairs and MEMSI supporters, Holly Dugan, Jonathan Hsy, and Alexa Alice Joubin plus ex-GWUer Lowell Duckert, voiced the underlying mixture of sadness and celebration that subtended this MEMSI-closing event.

Endings don’t always close exactly when we think they will, and Cord’s second finishing chorus of “another chance to pronounce MEMSI’s final syllables” proved just one more prologue to Lowell’s heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey as we presented the wizard of refuge and experiment with two symbolic gifts: a handmade wooden ark signed by the participants of the weekend’s event, and a walking stick for future adventures, inscribed with words of wisdom in two languages —

A home, a limit, and a recurring challenge.

Ad astra per elephantos! 

Jeffrey Letting Go.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Passing now through 30th Street Station, I’m tallying up how much I owe to MEMSI for its inspiration, hospitality, and relentless imagination. I counted five events since the sparkling TemFest of December 2010, but Jeffrey’s better accounting punched me up to seven, I think because MEMSI helped bring me to DC to speak to his Folger seminar in 2015 and a few years earlier to serve as Lowell’s external examiner for his dissertation defense. So many long rides on the Northeast Regional!

I don’t want to get too sentimental, since the best parts of MEMSI’s vision and drive remain in circulation through and beyond our academic culture. Its end punctuates one inflection of premodern studies, but, as Dan Remein cogently remarked yesterday, MEMSI has already moved through many phases and changes. Surely the response most in-keeping with the spirit of the beast will be to kindle more experimental fires and keep changing. Arks of history bend through MEMSI, with whimsy, toward community.

Thanks to everyone, in and beyond DC this weekend!

Plural Anthropocenes in Lausanne

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During the workshop, with Vanessa Daws’s watercolor

I’m just back from a thrilling and exhausting trip to Lausanne, where I was a guest of CUSO, the affiliated group of Western (Francophone) Swiss universities. On Saturday, for a group of post-docs, faculty, and graduate students gathered together from various universities and departments, I ran a morning workshop, heard two great early afternoon talks by Swiss doctoral students, and gave a lecture, “Eco-Poetics in the Anthropocene.” Last night, sitting in the belly of the big Air France bird, I tried to put some of it back into words.

  1. Pluralizing the Anthropocene means churning the idea out into the world. We started yesterday talking about the geological sciences, but pretty soon we moved into the visual arts, poetry, and eventually my beloved toxic byways near Newtown Creek.
  2.  Bruno Latour says the Anthropocene provides an alternative to modernity, which seems like something that we very much need.
  3. The last question after my talk observed that we’d spoken about many different pasts and presents over the long day, but “What do you have to say about the future?”
  4. I answered with my favorite old Polonius song about generic mixing and variety. I said that I hope the literary humanities can half create and perceive hybrid narratives that play across tragedy and utopia without hewing too exclusively to either extreme.
  5. I also got a pointed follow-up while I was packing up my things: “So, do you think the Anthropocene is a romance?”

    My hotel

  6. I don’t really think so, whatever my allegiance to the flexible and capacious ur-genre of tragicomic romance. But I am looking, as I said, for a not-only tragic futurity — and then, all of a sudden, the pointed question turned into discussion of Primo Levi’s retelling of Ulysses’s drowning in Dante, the tragic vision with which I opened Shipwreck Modernity. Down into the whirlpool sinks the hero, finding fragments of solace, perhaps, in the act of re-narration.

Watercolor by Vanessa Daws. 2018

The morning workshop reached its greatest focus and intensity when we talked about the amazing #pluralizetheanthropocene image that the artist Vanessa Daws made for the event. I had asked her to make an icon for us, and I gave a few suggestions, including the photograph of a ship overfull of refugees crossing the Med that I included in my pre-event post. Like all the participants in the workshop, I was blown away by what she created for us.

She choose to paint a watercolor, a circular image featuring a crowded ship, a stormy sea, and the tail of a vast monster, whose curves she modeled on a creature she found in an illustration from a paperback copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. (I’ve not yet tracked down the source, but I will.)

Near the Cathedral

We talked about the glorious colors: the yellow water-fire of the trash-filled sea spilling out the inhospitality of the Anthropocene. We speculated about the “ship of fools” perched on the trash-wave’s crest, teeming with faceless bodies. We wondered about those faces, about what was behind them. Old Man Anthropos may not have been there himself, unless that’s him in the crow’s nest with the spyglass. The vessel holds preterite ones, those who have been passed over, and who soon may plunge into iridescent waters.

How, I asked our group, does this fragile ship, sinuous tail, and crowded sea blaze forth our Anthropocene condition?

The particular joy of turning all the eyes in the room onto a (projected image of a) painting is that, after we’d spent the first hour-plus introducing ourselves and speculating about Anthropocene and other ideas, we were now aligned into community, everyone looking the same way. I’m not an art historian, but I love the focalizing pressure of a painting’s crafted surface. Its meanings can only emerge in time, but all that the image is and means shows itself simultaneously. Surface plenitude signifies all at once, through a unity into which our historical, cultural, and scientific ideas about environmental change can’t quite coalesce.

I had a line in the lecture I’d give a few hours later about the environmental humanities fostering techniques of attention, and I was thinking about that as all of us looked together at the painting and tried to make sense of it. I’d just received the image by email the day before, so it was new to everyone in the room.

Vanessa Daws, like me, is an open-water swimmer. We first met, at least in the world beyond Facebook, in the surf in Santa Barbara. When I look at her painting, I think about how angry the sea appears. As toxic, perhaps, as the waters of Newtown Creek.

The hinge of the day rotated around a pair of great presentations by CUSO grad students.

Rachel Nisbit, who had just submitted her dissertation the week before, presented a suggestive summary of the project, “Murmuring to Muttering: Anthropocene River Narratives (1789-2009).” She started with Wordsworth’s Prelude, turned her fluvial path toward George Eliot and then to Joyce’s Wake before concluding with Alice Oswald’s river-poem Dart, set in Devonshire. She also talked about her earlier geological field work, and shared some wonderful images from a dig in Germany. It made me think of Jeffrey Cohen’s idea of the Mississippi as an “earth artist,” shaping premodern and modern North America.

Lausanne Ouchy

The second paper was by Viola Marchi, who I think works mostly in science fiction, but for this occasion reimagined Sophocles’s famous tragedy as the story of Anthropos Rex, self-destroying figure for desire and painful knowledge. She spoke wonderfully about the Anthropocene’s challenge to theory and engagingly discussed the literary meanings of catastrophe and the sublime. She would later in the q&a after my talk offer a wonderfully enthusiastic question about disorientation and environmental experience. Wanting to connect to her late 20/21c materials, I nudged her toward Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, a disorienting novel about disorientation that highlights the violence that accompanies orienting technologies as they carve Lines onto nonhuman landscapes.

My lecture proffered four eco-keywords: catastrophe, time, human, and toxicity. I was happy with how they resonated with what we’d already been discussing.

Mont Blanc (center)

During the whole event, though, I heard an echoing nonhuman voice that I couldn’t quite work into the conversation —

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe —

I’d been up high to see the vistas the day before, so even as Viola talked about the Romantic sublime I was already there.

For much of the past decade or so, I’ve been consciously writing and thinking against a certain sublime of which Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” provides a defining lyric exemplar. That sublime imagines the human engagement with Nature in terms that are heroic, instrumental, macho, greedy to take in all the mountain’s sparkling glory.

So during my jet-lag processing Friday, I rented a car, drove about an hour into the Alps, and then rode multiple gondolas, trams, and ski lifts up to the 33oom top of Mont Fort, to spy out my own view to Mont Blanc. I stood there a minute in the cold wind and stared at the blaze of sun on snow.

Downhill skiing, which I’ve loved since I was six years old but haven’t done much for the past few seasons, is on a physical level an Anthropocene horror show, in which petro-industry funnels human bodies into glacial vastness. My love for it feels pretty guilty, these days.

But there I was, looking at the peaks, cold and a bit tired, murmuring Shelley’s opening lines to myself:

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind…

How everlasting are the things of this Anthropocene? How much can flow into each solitary mind? How can we love this fragile and partially inaccessible world, its flashes of light and its slow dripping melt?

That’s what I was thinking about on Air France westbound into JFK last night.

Thanks to my amazing hosts at CUSO, especially fondue companions and organizers Maria Shmygol, Kirsten Stirling, and Zoe Imfeld. Deep gratitude to Vanessa Daws for the art, and to Mont Blanc for showing itself through the haze.

#pluralizetheanthropocene!: Lausanne 24 Feb 2018

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Anthropocene travels

In just under two weeks, on 24 Feb, I’ll be at the Universite de Lausanne in Switzerland, leading a one-day workshop for the English department of CUSO (Conference Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale) under the title of my latest scholarly mantra: Pluralize the Anthropocene! I’m looking forward to talking about how Anthropocene discourses are engaging with literary and cultural studies. There will be a morning workshop, several presentations by graduate students, and I’ll do a late afternoon talk on “Eco-Poetics in the Anthropocene.”

Before the workshop, I’ll circulate to the registered participants a little bit of my recent writing on the topic, including my chapter “Enter Anthropocene, circa 1610” in Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s new collection, Anthropocene Reading. Beyond that, to make things easy, I’m also circulating some of my open-source web writing. Follow along at home if you’d like!

Topic 1: Error and Anachronism

The Two Anachronisms (Glasgow Review 2017)

Optional: Error: Stabs at an Ecological Dynamic (Arcade 2015)

Topic 2: Toxicity

Motion Sickness (Arcade 2017)

Topic 3: Anthropocene Plurality

The Neologismcene (Arcade 2017)

Optional: Sailing without Ahab (Glasgow Review 2017)

Further reading for enthusiasts would include the rest of Anthropocene Reading, the latest volume by Stacy Alaimo, Exposed, Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s new collection, Veer Ecology, and many other excellent things.

Heathen Earth by Kyle McGee (Punctum 2017)

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Another gorgeous book by Punctum!

[A copy-edited revision of this book review will appear in the journal Law and Literature]

Kyle McGee, Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology. Earth: Punctum, 2017

During the bleak anticipatory interim between November 9, 2016, and January 21, 2017, Kyle McGee faced a “severest necessity” that suddenly “imposed” on him the composition of this short and resonant book. “This is not,” he notes in his Acknowledgments, “a book I wanted to write” (xiii) – nor, we might concur, a future in which we wanted to live. But a year into the Trumpocene, it’s good to have some guidance.

While we braced for the Inauguration, McGee, a writer, legal practitioner, and author of books on Latour and Delueze, shaped Heathen Earth as a stone to hurl into our present void. His angry opening salvo insists that Trump represents less aberration than the logical and horrific extension of elements of our present era that we fail to look at directly. At the “intersection of two vertigos” he identifies these symptoms as the “placelessness” imposed by globalization and the “landlessness” eroded by global warming. Rip away place and dissolve earth without building adequate responses to these dislocations, and you get – well, we know what we’ve got. Or at least we can feel it.

A broken system slouches into view in the wake of neoliberalism. Like many commentators, McGee treats Trump and Sanders as twin exposers of neoliberalism’s tired technofantasies. Trump’s retrograde response to globalized vertigo “sanctifies natus, birth, above all else” (59). Playing on the common compliment paid the leader by his fans, McGee reads being “down to earth” as “an unmistakeable reinscription of certainty into a world…that has become increasingly ambiguous” (60). In this reading, sovereignty emerges less from the Schmittian Decider than through a logic of exceptionalism and tribal / racial supremacy: “sovereign is that which divides the exception from the common” (62). To be included in the exception – to be white, male, rich, powerful, or to believe in the cultural myth of an orange-headed reality TV star who embodies those magic powers – allows uncertainty to be kept at bay, at least temporarily.

So far, so familiar: reading Trump as the ogre that ate the neoliberal consensus seems convincing but hardly shocking. But McGee pulls us one step past twitter radicalism by connecting Trump’s longstanding climate denialism with the collective agenda of both the man and his corporate allies. The project, McGee insists, is geocide, the destruction of Earth systems. Global warming in this view is not an accidental waste project of industrialization but a political gun to the head: “By way of geoengineered global warming, the climate itself can become the principal American weapon in the endless war on terror” (91). Or, put in different narrative terms, “the real Death Star is already here, in our abundant fossil fuel extraction” (98). What else does it mean to have a former Exxon CEO as Secretary of State? Geocide in the Trumpocene mobilizes the state to intensify global ecological crisis because “global warming [is] an unqualified capitalist good” (102). This soiled earth is “heathen” because in its “state of godlessness” it rejects all prior claims to mitigation or shared solace.

But there’s a twist: as Trumpian geocide breaks the world, it cracks open a window for quasi-Leibneizian geodicy. For McGee this vindication of “collective obligation” can only operate through “a pluralism of modes of experience and a multiplicity of arts of sensing and connecting” (104). He shows some sympathy for the non-technocrats demeaned by neoliberalism. “Climate and earth systems sciences,” McGree writes, “need non-scientific allies in literature and the arts, in law and politics, in economics and business, in journalism and media” (113). The total conceptual revolution he anticipates, however, suggests that an adequate response to the forces of Orange must include much more than new allies and new modes of thinking. “Be realistic,” he quips, “demand the impossible” (110).

We’ve heard calls for this sort of “new polity outside of the … state” (144) before, though McGee’s insistence that the right adjective for the state is “geocidal” raises the ecological stakes. The Fortescue-ean proposal that our legal structures be understood as analogous to the ligatures of a human body (124) underlines the fundamental reimagining of the duties of the state that McGee proposes. Alongside a recast politics he seeks a “radical rethinking of the Law of Nature” (125). His radicalism in places broadly parallels the more measured wishes of Jedidiah Purdy, whose After Nature (2015) asks for an “Anthropocene democracy” whose duties and pleasures would embrace humans and nonhumans while also redressing past exclusions. The “necessary couplings between legality and ecology,” McGee insists, “are still yet to be drawn” (127). He gestures toward Bruno Latour’s hopes, as stated in his Facing Gaia lectures (2015), for an international democratic order and an environmental commons to redress the placelessness and landlessness that birthed the Trumpocene. At the inchoate core of McGee’s “democratic weapons” are forces of community: “alliance, assembly, occupation, strike, protest, march, demonstration, above all appearance” (144).

He’s written a smart, angry, insightful, and provocative book to take with us to the barricades.